


Nerve

by FloreatCastellum



Series: Slice of Life One-Shots [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, First Love, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, I Love You, Post-Battle of Hogwarts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-26
Updated: 2019-04-26
Packaged: 2020-02-04 20:37:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18612085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FloreatCastellum/pseuds/FloreatCastellum
Summary: Just days after the battle, Harry and Ginny speak.





	Nerve

It had been five strange, exhausting days. Harry had done nothing but funerals. He was running out of black robes, no matter how quickly the house elves did his laundry. His shoulders ached from the coffins. Everyone wanted him there, even if he didn’t know them, because of course they did. And of course he couldn’t say no. How could he?

Remus and Tonks had been buried together. He had been in a daze of denial.

‘Do you want to pick Remus’s epitaph?’ they had asked.

‘Yes,’ he said, even though he didn’t.

_To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die._

That was what he had decided. He was ashamed to admit he had seen it on another grave, for some stranger.

‘It’s perfect, Harry,’ Hermione had said. ‘So fitting.’

‘Yeah,’ he’d said, embarrassed to admit it was simply the only one that didn’t make him cringe out of sappiness or feel like a Victorian.

He had helped pick out the clothes for his body, too, and though he hadn’t dressed it, seen it lying there, cold and still and pale. He looked at the watch on his wrist, simple, with a thin gold line around the face.

‘Could I take that?’ he asked the Ministry morgue worker. When she looked uncomfortable, he added, ‘not for me, for his son. I’ll put it in writing for you.’ She had agreed, because fuck it, he was Harry Potter, and he may as well use that card now.

Teddy had cried through the funeral, and Andromeda carried him up to receive Tonks’s Order of Merlin, and Harry carried him up to get Remus’s. He had said a eulogy too, stammering at the sea of somber faces staring at him, reading out something he had written that he now realised was too cheesy, too sentimental, too personal. He had written it as though he were talking to Lupin, but the entire experience was a sharp slap in the face - a realisation that funerals were for the living.

Afterwards, he got drunk at the wake. Everyone kept buying him drinks, and he wasn’t going to say no.

‘Harry,’ said a quiet, calm voice. He felt a warm hand on his shoulder. ‘Come and walk with me.’

He followed Ginny out, her warm fingers lacing with his. There were reporters outside, and there was a flurry of flashes, and shouts, and bangs and smoke from their cameras, but the aurors pushed a path through for them.

‘I want somewhere private,’ she said.

He nodded. ‘Take my arm.’

They appeared in a forest. The silence rang in their ears after the noise they had just left. The spring sun was warm, but the breeze cool - it rustled the leaves like a whisper, sent a slight ripple across the pool before them. Last time Harry had been here, Ron had pulled him out of that pool, but now everything was a rich green and brown, and the air was sweet.

They held each other for a few moments, treasuring the silence. There had been no big moment or conversation, no question over whether the other had waited or not. They had fallen into each other’s arms without hesitation, from the moment he had apologised to her in the hospital wing.

‘I’m sorry I’m drunk,’ he mumbled.

‘I am too,’ she said. ‘Don’t tell mum.’

He smiled slightly, and raised a hand to brush her soft hair out of her face. They stared into each other’s eyes for a while. Harry wanted to memorise her. He still thought, sometimes, that it might all be over within seconds.

‘I wanted to ask you,’ she said calmly, ‘whether you knew you would come back. When you met him in the forest, I mean.’

He swallowed. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I had no intention of coming back. That was… ‘ Harry shook his head. ‘I went there to die.’

‘I realised,’ she said hollowly, ‘that you must have walked straight past me. When I was trying to help Polly.’

‘When did you realise that?’ he asked. His fingers still brushed against her soft cheeks.

‘During the funeral,’ she said. ‘When you spoke about the brave choice Remus made to go and fight, knowing what he was leaving behind.’

‘I see,’ he said. He hadn’t intended that to allude to him at all. He had been thinking, entirely, of the happiness Remus had the day Teddy was born, and the words he had spoken to him in the dark forest.

‘So did you? Walk straight past me?’

He sighed heavily. ‘Not straight past,’ he said. ‘I saw you. I stopped.’

Her eyes filled with tears, but she stared at him intensely. Not a single drop rolled down her cheek. ‘You didn’t speak to me,’ she said. ‘I thought I felt something, or heard something. That sensation when someone is watching you.’

‘Yes.’

‘But you didn’t speak to me.’

‘How could I?’ he asked, his voice cracking. ‘I would have stared at you forever. I never would have left. Everything I wanted with you, everything we could have been…’

‘I never would have known,’ she said hollowly. ‘What had happened. Really.’

He felt as though he’d been punched in the stomach. ‘You’d have believed him? Thought I’d fled?’

‘No of course not,’ she said sharply. ‘But I wouldn’t have known if you’d have put up a fight, or spoken, or tried to-’

‘I did none of those things,’ he said. ‘I went there to die.’

Now the tears did fall, she blinked them away, but kept her face steady, still gazing up at him.

‘I got to look at you one last time,’ he said. ‘And hear your voice. But I knew any more and I wouldn’t have been able to do it. I had to go on.’ Now his own eyes were prickling, and he was trying to stay steady too. ‘And when it happened, you were the last thing I saw. I mean it, Ginny. I thought of nothing but you. And I…’ he took a steadying breath. ‘I knew you were alive, and that was what mattered to me.’

There was that strange feeling again, the thing that started in his stomach and made his heart ache, the thing that seemed to grow every time he looked at her.

She raised her hands, cupped his face. He closed his eyes to her touch. Perhaps this was it. Perhaps she was going to tell him that he should have said goodbye, that he had hurt her too much, that she was sorry but she couldn’t look at him…

‘I love you,’ she said.

His eyes snapped open. He was breathing heavily. These foreign words, they had made his chest ache more than ever. ‘Do you mean it?’ he asked. ‘Because if you don’t, please don’t say that to me-’

‘Of course I do,’ she said, and to his astonishment, she looked bewildered. ‘How could you not know that?’

He kissed her. He was in oblivion again, his mind filled with the white fog of kings cross, his arms gripping her close. ‘I love you,’ he said, as they broke apart. His tongue had never formed those words, they filled his mouth, filled his throat, felt like a new world.

She kissed him back, her hands rising up, one at the back of his neck, the other at his furiously beating heart. He was overwhelmed, stunned, delirious - this was not the alcohol he had consumed. It was simply everything he had never dared to dream of.


End file.
